Alice in Kanji Land brings kanji learning into the 21st century, teaching kanji in the form of a narrative structurally linked to an SRS deck (included free) that will cement the kanji into your long-term memory with an algorithm based on the brain’s learning process.

It also teaches kanji not as abstractions but as part of the organic whole of language, making them easier to grasp and retain.

Using Alice in Kanji Land in conjunction with the deck (about 15 minutes per day) you will not just learn all the kanji needed for JLPT level 5 (all first-grade kanji and a substantial portion of second-grade kanji) together with quite a lot of vocabulary.

You will also learn

The radicals and underlying construction principles that will make it far easier to learn more kanji in future.

The ways in which kanji fit together in themselves and the ways in which they align with other kanji and kana to form words.

The principles behind the ways they are pronounced in different circumstances.

Learning kanji not as abstract isolates but as part of an organic whole turns an exercise in brute-force memorization into something more logical and easily graspable.

And if this all sounds a bit abstract – well, actually it’s fun. This is an Alice book after all…

Kanji as Character and Adventure

The age-old technique of making kanji into story-pictures is brought up to date by integrating it with an Alice in Wonderland storyline that makes encounters with the Kanji memorable and engages the emotional responses as well as intellectual ones (extremely important for memory).

We chose Alice not just because she’s cute. Also because the crazy logic and punning nature of the Alice books is exactly suited to the kind of thinking needed to make kanji mnemonics.

Alice Plus SRS

You can read the story without putting too much effort into memorizing the kanji.

Because the Alice in Kanji Land SRS deck will handle memorization for you.

The back of each card has extensive reminders of the story’s mnemonic elements in the notes after the answer. So you can refresh your memory by reminding yourself of the story as often as you need to.

After a while the story will drop into the background and the words will become second nature.

In accordance with our philosophy, there are no “abstract kanji” cards. The front of every card is a real word that has been introduced in the book, incorporating one or more kanji also introduced in the book.

The back of the card gives you the meaning and pronunciation of the word on the front. The word is spoken aloud by the card (well, you know how cards are in Alice) as well as being written.

Below the meaning and definition are notes reminding you of the mnemonic elements of the story. You can use these as much or as little as you need them.

Signed edition

It also helps Cure Dolly because Amazon eats most of the money from books they sell. So buying from KawaJapa direct helps keep the lights on here and make it possible to provide so many free videos and other information. You can also buy the book from Amazon.